Yeah, I used to be a fan of the 50/50 model.
I thought it could be a good encouragement to spend time in the "new" section and look for gems, not like many whales would actually put any time into that, but they might have seen a reason to support or even organize such manual curation initiatives.
No, that would almost look too much like "proof-of-brain", so instead, let's just make sure auto-voting circle-jerks stay hip and give all the benefit to content indifferent subscription votes... YAY!